THE PEACOCK FEATHER 

In the faraway town of Oshomogwo, there lived an old man who gave people signal whenever they want to go to war！If he gives you a white peacock feather, it means that you are going to win and if he gives you another colour or any mixture of it then, it means you are going to fail and towns usually sent their messengers to him before going to war or deciding not to.

Imiano was in the King's Royal Guard when he was called upon to run the errand but unfortunately for him and for the whole town, he misplaced the feather on his way coming back. So, he replaced it with another one which he found on the way not minding that it was not a peacock feather but a turkey feather. So it was that he returned with the wrong signal and they went to war in which they were defeated.

The major cause of the struggle was a parcel of land between the two villages. The Omalarum people and the Okatatum had lived as neighbours until the issue of land came up and they were in dismay as both villages had been marrying from each other and they wouldn't want to spill their own blood. So, they sent imiano to go and consult the old man at Oshomogwo before they could decide whether to fight or not！When they were being killed at the battle ground, they couldn't believe it as they had thought victory would be on their side！When they failed, they decided to dispatch a retaliation force into the thick forest to fish the man out but their greatest undoing was that they didn't ask imiano,what happened along the way！

What happened was that imiano was thinking about Ogechi all the while that he was running the errand！Ogechi was the girl he wanted to marry but the villages joined hands and sacrificed her to the river goddess because she was a virgin and the damned goddess had requested for one not knowing that imiano was her secret admirer.

According to him, "it served them right！" but he never knew that it was going to get to him. When the war broke out, imiano was at the king's palace chewing kola nut with the elders and smiling while other warriors went to war to be killed. When his own troop couldn't win, they sent words to the king for reinforcement and imiano's team was sent！On getting there, he hid himself because he knew they could not win the war！It was after they had ended the war that he came out and offered to help gather the corpses of the fallen heroes and also the left over weapons. The people of imiano's town went home licking their wounds while the others went home rejoicing.

That week, the king sent a sophisticated group to the forest to fetch the old man but they didn't come out from that place alive！He sent the second group and the same thing happened. So, the third group and the wise general got involved. When they got to the mouth of the river, they dropped all their weapons and went in unarmed before going to see the old man.

When the old man saw them, he started laughing and told them that if they had not done what they did, they would have just died like the other ones because he was not even in the forest as at the time they came and that those people got eaten by a huge lion.

The wise general told him that they did not need a weapon to catch him because he had never given a wrong signal being that he had nothing to gain or lose from the warfare or the outcome of it. At they requested him to tell them exactly what happened and he narrated everything according as he had seen it in the realm of the spirits. That week, they regretted not asking questions before sacrificing that girl and imiano was justified. When they got home, the king did everything necessary and the wicked water spirit was sacked from the village stream being that it had not contributed anything towards the positive growth of the society if not asking for innocent virgins！

Before they could get home, imiano had already packed his things and fled the community.